Well that's not very nice! It's just a Tesseract!

Right. Be mindful of the effect these parameters have on the variance of yourself and the participants'.

I'm very excited to hear this! I'm switching my 2.2 GH/s from slush as soon as I have the time. I'll be happy to further advise you about the implementation details.

By "no fees", you mean a balancing negative fixed fee?

No pressure... I think it's a useful feature, but I wouldn't want it to delay more critical things.

Payment comes from providing value. Securing the Bitcoin network is valuable.

If there was no incentive to mine, people wouldn't mine and the network would be easily destroyed.

In a way, these are made up blank calculations that solely require work.

As rezin777 explains, requiring that miners do some sisyphean labor before they can submit a block secures the network.

With the recent issues with The Madhatter, I feel that I ought to say a few words about my own risk management strategies and trustworthiness. This also seems like a good opportunity to provide a general status update.

Things have been going relatively well. I'm still evaluating whether it makes sense to me to continue offering this service, and working on formalizing it as a business entity and figuring out the legal aspects.

So far not a single soul requested to sell bitcoins to me. However, demand for buying bitcoins has been very strong, much stronger than I anticipated or prepared for. In fact I'm out of stock as we speak. I am constantly buying on mtgox, but this both increases my cost (which I pass on to customers) and causes delays in supply. I'm working with my bank on streamlining transfers to mtgox, and will try to make transfers more frequent. This also has cost implications, but as I said to mndrix once, having a functioning service trumps minimizing fees. I try to apply the same for my own business. I'm also working on arranging the reserve funds needed for a smooth operation.

I try to build a sustainable business model with fees which, to the best of my estimates, cover any risks I'm taking, as well as incentivize me to continue operating the service honestly. The ideal is that whatever I may stand to gain from abusing my reputation would be dwarfed by my future earnings from maintaining it. If an opportunity to make actual profit by going rogue ever presents itself anyway... Well, I certainly have no intention of taking it. It is well known that otherwise upstanding people can change their ways when facing a large profit opportunity. I'd like to think I am at least resilient to its corruptive power.

I don't typically offer locked exchange rates, for a reason that's mostly technical. I receive payment by bank transfers, and in most cases I have no way of knowing when a transfer order was given. Someone could lock a rate, wait to see changes in the global exchange rate, and back out if it becomes unfavorable. Dealing with this by way of a deposit or payment for a purchase option would be more complicated than I'd like at this point.

If I did offer locked rates, honoring them would be a no-brainer. I'd set aside the agreed upon amount of bitcoins, and for all purposes I have already sold them for a given price, and they now belong to the customer. I'm merely holding them until the payment arrives. Refusing to release them is downright stealing, no different than any vendor stealing the sold merchandise after the sale.

What I do is open rate, I determine the rate at the time I see that I received payment. This is easier technically, but trickier financially. If the rate drops too low my stock could be no longer sufficient for the trade. I do keep a spare to protect against normal fluctuations. But if this happens anyway, I would typically send the bitcoins as they become available (which shouldn't take more than a few days). In the highly unlikely (I hope) catastrophic scenario that the exchange rate crashes, committing me to a large bitcoin payment, and then climbs back up to a level at which I will never be able to purchase the required amount, I will simply send the money back by bank transfer.

Wow.
I have no desire to continue discussing with you. Have a good day.

Edit: Well, ok, I'll try. I am not a slippery bastard and I did not suggest you were a curmudgeon.

The OP may have referred to using the Bitcoin protocol itself, but to me it was clear that this is not an essential feature of the suggestion but rather a rough throwaway due to not yet refining it enough. I took the OP and built up on it, discussing ways it could work. At every point I was very clear to which vision of the original idea I am referring. In comment #16 I have already explained that I do not think the correct implementation of the idea is to use the Bitcoin protocol itself for anything, but you seemed to have ignored it.

My vision, once again, is that people who operate computers who do Bitcoin mining will also be able to devote compute resources elsewhere to reduce their risks. I'm sure this is what the OP intended too.

You may have interpreted the early ideas in this thread too literally, and been under the impression that any discussion made was about the implementation details suggested verbatim.

I'm not sure if we have an essential disagreement about anything. But I request that you take my comments at face value, rather than accusing them of "twisting the discussion" if they relate to a vision of the OP different from yours and resorting to name calling.

Money can be exchanged for goods and services. If there are no goods and services in the world, what do you use the money for?

You seemed to be implying that people everywhere need to stop creating anything and devote all the world's resources to operating Bitcoin. This is of course nonsensical, people need to create a wide variety of valuable things. Some of these things may require grid computing. There's no reason not to have in existence other grid computing projects, paid or otherwise. Again, this is unrelated to Bitcoin itself.

Right now AFAIK all pools are done as a hobby or a side business. Going forward mining pools will be serious business and the issued involved will be worked out. The premise of the OP is something that will take years to manifest.

We're definitely not talking here about a pool operator who tricks his users who signed up for just Bitcoin mining by diverting resources to other endeavors (at least, I wasn't). We're talking about the general possibility of alternative computing targets, regardless of specific implementation details, with or without anything to do with a Bitcoin mining pool service.

If you prefer to provide your compute power to a dedicated Bitcoin mining pool, be my guest. Personally I will seriously consider a hypothetical service which provides some combination of mining with other paid activities.

I don't know a lot about long polling but I can't think of any reason whatsoever it should be incompatible with score-based.

There is no global change in the network goals. It's just more stuff people with computing hardware can do. It's unrelated to Bitcoin, but as I explained, it will have the side effect of strengthening the Bitcoin network.

Providing the backbone for the world's future monetary system is very important, but people need computing power for other stuff too. What good is money, if no value is created to be exchanged for it?

1. A distributed network has high communication latency.
2. A network node can misuse the data you send for the calculation.
3. A network node can send you wrong calculations results to sabotage you.
4. A network node can pretend to do work to take your money.
5. A network node has hardware unoptimized for your computing task.

The Bitcoin mining protocol has very specific features that make some of these points moot. The Bitcoin network is very far from being a drop-in replacement for supercomputers. Going forward people will probably come up with ways to use it they are willing to pay for, but there aren't currently any organizations waiting to dump money on something like this. If there were, they'd be all over the people who do folding@home.

Some of the computational power will still go to mining. This will actually increase the difficulty, because for a given difficulty level the reward is at worst the same and the risks much lower.

I think deepbit's long polling and payouts for invalid blocks makes up for the fee difference, so please drop the "you're an idiot if you pay 3% to deepbit" attitude.

Basic economic theory says that money now is better than money later (with implications to both maturity delay and instant payouts).

Regardless of this, instant payout is a useful feature for many reasons, financial too but also technical. Of course it should usually be used in conjunction with thresholded automatic payments. There's no excuse not to include it, and there's no need to call those who want it "irrational".

I think F4C3 is the one maintaining the Zen-cart module, he's probably the one to ask. You can send him a PM.

No. You don't want a PSU to run 24/7 so close to full capacity.

And you should consider getting an 80 Plus Gold PSU instead, like Seasonic X-850 or Corsair AX850.

Bitcoin is a huge thing to wrap one's mind about. You need to at least tell them what Bitcoin is, how to use it and what they can do with it, complete with the relevant links.

I have just such a system (except that I have DDR2) and so far I'm happily running it with a Seasonic X-850. Make sure you get an 80+ Gold PSU.

For most transactions it is enough to see that it propagated in the network (takes a few seconds) to be safe, you don't need confirmation in a block.

For physical bitcoins, we already have Bitbills.

Phone app based bitcoin payments will probably be even more convenient than notes going forward.

Instant payout means there is a button you can press and get your current balance sent to you immediately. You can limit it to being used only a few times per day. This is a useful feature I'd like to see implemented.

Sorry, I didn't read your question carefully enough.